Somewhere within the meanings of the mysterious formula that Federico Fellini’s acrobatic creativity employed in his film 8½, the soul lies hidden. A mosaic of dreams, memories and fantasies: ‘ASA NISI MASA’, it read. Written on a blackboard, it vanishes as the reader erases it whilst reading it backwards, or hears it whispered by children in their attempt to make a painting’s eyes move. How many secrets does an image hold and reveal? How many alphabets and distant meanings does it convey to the ‘reader’?
Just as the cinema screen is a theatre, so too is the space of a sheet of paper. A theatre of the soul capable of containing everything. In these illustrations by Efrem Barrotta, dedicated to the great ‘master’ of cinema on the centenary of his birth, dreams and their realisation are celebrated, and a festival is held in honour of encounter and collective expression.
The illustrations are the result of an exhibition project created by BigSur for the new spaces at the Cinema DB d’Essai in Lecce at the end of 2019, and thus speak of the vision that unites two ‘historic’ Salento-based enterprises: each, in its own way, shares the same dedication to communication and the creation of culture, working day after day, in balance and on the edge of imagination, to forge virtuous alliances that promote and affirm the beauty of connection.
